JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

158Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsan external relation which can be established only by a human reality acting as witness.By contrast, there is a type of negation which establishes an internal relation betweenwhat one denies and that concerning which the denial is made. 1Of all internal negations, the one which penetrates most deeply into being, the onewhich constitutes in its being the being concerning which it makes the denial alongwith the being which it denies—this negation is lack. This lack does not belong to thenature of the in-itself, which is all positivity. It appears in the world only with theupsurge of human reality. It is only in the human world that there can be lacks. A lackpresupposes a trinity: that which is missing or “the lacking,” that which misses whatis lacking or “the existing,” and a totality which has been broken by the lacking andwhich would be restored by the synthesis of “the lacking” and “the existing”—this is“the lacked.” 2 The being which is released to the intuition of human reality is alwaysthat to which some thing is lacking—i.e., the existing. For example, if I say that themoon is not full and that one quarter is lacking, I base this judgment on full intuition ofthe crescent moon. Thus what is released to intuition is an in-itself which by itself isneither complete nor incomplete but which simply is what it is, without relation withother beings. In order for this in-itself to be grasped as the crescent moon, it isnecessary that a human reality surpass the given toward the project of the realizedtotality—here the disk of the full moon—and return toward the given to constitute itas the crescent moon; that is, in order to realize it in its being in terms of the totalitywhich becomes its foundation. In this same surpassing the lacking will be posited asthat whose synthetic addition to the existing will reconstitute the synthetic totality ofthe lacked. In this sense the lacking is of the same nature as the existing; it wouldsuffice to reverse the situation in order for it to become the existing to which thelacking is missing, while the existing would become the lacking. This lacking as thecomplement of the existing is determined in its being by the synthetic totality of thelacked. Thus in the human world, the incomplete being which is released to intuitionas lacking is constituted in its being by the lacked—that is, by what it is not. It is thefull moon which confers on the crescent moon its being as crescent; what-is-notdetermines what-is. It is in the being of the existing, as the correlate of a humantranscendence, to lead outside itself to the being which it is not—as to its meaning.Human reality by which lack appears in the world must be itself a lack. For lack cancome into being only through lack; the in-itself can not be the occasion of lack in the initself.In other words, in order for being to be lacking or lacked, it is necessary that abeing make itself its own lack; only a being which lacks can surpass being toward thelacked.The existence of desire as a human fact is sufficient to prove that human reality isa lack. In fact how can we explain desire if we insist on viewing it as a psychic state;